Afton caped crusaders' hats for hipsters benefit kids with cancer

Ashley Boesel buzzed over downtown Minneapolis in a helicopter this week -- accompanied by Superman.

The 8-year-old Cottage Grove girl gazed down on Target Field, the Mississippi River and "the hole that was the Metrodome" at dusk Tuesday in an adventure the young leukemia patient said she'll always remember.

That's just what Superman -- aka Zachary Quinn -- wanted to hear.

Quinn is one of the founders of Love Your Melon, an Afton-based nonprofit organization that has given away experiences such as helicopter and limo rides -- and more than 6,000 cotton-knit hats -- to children with cancer.

Here's how it works: For every Love Your Melon hat purchased, the Love Your Melon crew donates a hat to a child with cancer.

Zachary Quinn, one of the founders of Love Your Melon, gets ready to board a helicopter at the Anoka County-Blaine Airport with 8-year-old Ashley Boesel of Cottage Grove on Tuesday, April 8, 2014. (Courtesy of Love Your Melon)

Love Your Melon has sold 12,000 hats so far and expects to triple that number this year. Quinn and Love Your Melon co-founder Brian Keller, both juniors at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, have set a daunting goal: They want to give a hat to every American child with cancer.

"It's all about embracing what you have and giving these kids some confidence," said Quinn, 21, who lives in St. Mary's Point. "The hats provide warmth through their time in the hospital and restore confidence when they're losing their hair."

Kris Boesel said her daughter, a third-grader at Pullman Elementary School in St.

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Paul Park, received one of the first Love Your Melon hats after the nonprofit's creation in 2012.

"It was so nice knowing that someone cared enough to purchase the hat," she said. "We were so humbled by their kindness."

Quinn and Keller also gave Ashley's older sister, Cala, her own hat and brought her along for the helicopter adventure.

"Whatever they did for Ashley, they did for Cala, too," she said. "We always try to make things equal, and they understand that. They're just great.

If you go

Love Your Melon will host an open house from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday at their headquarters in downtown Afton. The event, which will be held at 3321 St. Croix Trail S., will include custom hat making, live music, food and children's activities. For more information or to RSVP, email info @loveyourmelon.com.

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CLASS PROJECT

Love Your Melon started as a homework assignment for a class at St. Thomas. Quinn and Keller were asked to come up with an idea for a self-sustainable business for their Introduction to Entrepreneurship class in 2012.

Quinn, who was reading Blake Mycoskie's book "Start Something That Matters," suggested that they embrace the "buy-one, donate-one" business model. Mycoskie is the founder of TOMS, a California company that donates a pair of shoes to an impoverished child for every pair sold; part of the profit for each pair of sunglasses TOMS sells goes toward an effort to restore the eyesight of people in developing countries.

"It tied in well for us because we knew we were going to be selling to college kids, and we knew we had to give them something that they could afford to buy, but still see the impact that they were going to have on somebody else's life," Quinn said.

"They needed to see that tangible project because they are going to wear the same hat that the kid gets to wear, too. It's a really cool experience just sharing that love."

Manufacturing the hats in the United States and keeping those donated in the country was key, he said.

"People get excited about this because it is something they can do in their community," Quinn said. "So many buy-one, give-one programs give to other countries -- you can't discount that, it's necessary -- but we feel that something needs to come from here and go back to here."

The foundation is headquartered in Afton's Old Village area at 3321 St. Croix Trail S., across the street from the Afton House Inn, in the space that formerly housed the Afton Historical Society Press.

Hundreds of Love Your Melon hats are color-coded and stored in clear-plastic bins in the building's lower level. The hats, which have been manufactured by a company in Oregon, will soon be made by Minnesota Knitting Mills in Mendota Heights.

Each hat features a "Love Your Melon" patch in felt or leather; hats range in price from $25 to $30. The leather comes S.B. Foot Tanning Co., Red Wing Shoe's leather manufacturer; the patches are sewn on at CLG Pro Rodeo Products in Minneapolis.

ATHLETES AND SUPERHEROES

Quinn and Keller, who wear custom-made superhero costumes when they visit the hospitals, insist that each hat be given away in person "by someone who can create a smile -- a superhero or an athlete or a musician or anybody with some sort of energy or excitement," Quinn said.

"We've been in hospital storage rooms. They get given stuff all the time," he said. "We want the kids to understand the meaning of these hats -- that there is compassion and love that come with them. It's like a big hug around their head.

"But the children need a story behind it to appreciate it. If Nick Leddy in Chicago comes in to give away one of the hats, that kid is going to wear that hat forever," he said, referring to the Chicago Blackhawks hockey player.

Quinn, an entrepreneurship major, and Keller, a finance major, have enlisted the help of other college students around the country to help them with their cause.

On April 1, 25 Love Your Melon ambassadors were sent care packages -- 50 hats to a box -- and the volunteers must come up with a creative way to give away their hats and document it on social media.

"Some have gotten Olympic athletes," Quinn said. "We've heard of a couple of skiers in Boston. Someone has Bucky Badger."

The pair have also taken their mission on the road; they recently undertook a 26-day, 5,000-mile bus tour over their J-term, the long break between semesters. Their "Smile Tour" took them to 18 cities, 23 states, nine children's hospitals and seven colleges in January and February. Their next tour, which kicks off May 15, will take them to the West Coast.

ONE OLD BUS

They travel in an old Philadelphia commuter bus that they bought for $10,000 from Rochester City Lines. They ripped out all the seats, scrubbed off years of grime and put in beds "so we can sleep in Walmart parking lots," Quinn said.

The bus, which has 999,850 miles on it, is wrapped in a dark-blue mobile billboard that says Love Your Melon. Companies such as Bolander Construction, Esch Construction, Nate Winberg Construction, Room & Board, 3M Commercial Graphics, Vomela and the United Applications Standard Group donated to the cause.

"We wouldn't have gotten our bus on tour without their help," Quinn said. "We came up with the idea in late November, bought the bus two weeks later and left on the road in a month. There was so much to get done, and they worked overtime to make it happen."

Keller, 20, who grew up in Andover, said the bus tours are designed to help spread the word about Love Your Melon.

"It's really about inspiring other college students to make a difference in their own communities and showing them that we were just two college students who started this," Keller said. "Our biggest supporters are college students. They love to wear (the hats) because they look stylish and are part of a great cause."

Love Your Melon has received great press. When the "Today" show featured the organization in February, the operation got -- in one day -- orders for 2,500 hats, and its website got 72,000 views and crashed five times.

When its founders appeared on "Good Morning America," they got to meet British singer Ellie Goulding.

"We were wearing our superhero costumes, and when she saw us, she came running up to us and said, in her British accent, 'Can I get a picture of you guys?' "

MOVED BY ZACH SOBIECH

Meeting Zach Sobiech, the Lakeland teenager who wrote "Clouds" and became an Internet sensation shortly before dying of a rare form of bone cancer last year, had a profound effect on the young men.

"It was the first time that we understood that this could be us," Quinn said. "We had compassion for these kids, and we loved what we were doing, but we weren't understanding that we could be right there, so Zach put that in perspective for us."

They created a special Love Your Melon hat in Sobiech's honor to benefit the Zach Sobiech Osteosarcoma Fund through the Children's Cancer Research Fund.

But Keller and Quinn wanted to do even more for Sobiech.

"We can give Zach 20 hats, and he'll love them, which he did, but we were, like, what would he want to do? What would we want to do if we were in his position?" Quinn said. "So we came up with the idea of a helicopter ride."

Love Your Melon arranged for Sobiech and his girlfriend, Amy Adamle, to go on a helicopter ride, with Minnesota Helicopter, which operates out of the airport in Blaine. They have since paid for 11 children to go on helicopter rides.

Many of the children are patients at the University of Minnesota Children's Hospital.

"It makes a world of difference for a kid in that treatment process. You can't just pump them full of medicine and take them away from all of their friends and everything they love to do and expect them to be healthy again.

"That's what we're trying to fix. We're encouraging joy and bringing some fun activities to them. We had a desire to go out and change the world. We want to help people and bring happiness."

IF YOU GO

Love Your Melon will host an open house from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday at their headquarters at at 3321 St. Croix Trail S. in downtown Afton. The event will include custom- hat making, live music, food and children's activities. For information or to RSVP, email to @loveyourmelon.com.